Our life cycles are not linear, our future exists without time. It is a dream, uncolonized.
Indigenous Anti-Futurist Manifesto
As a people who have been stripped of our history, language, identity, and pride, we attempt again and again to find what we have lost by digging into our cultural roots imaginatively and making art out of our findings.
Gloria Anzaldúa
In a three year seminar- laboratory the exhibition “Maroon Anti-Futurism” was elaborated, taking place at La Virreina in Barcelona. Verena Melgarejo Weinandt was one of the selected artist and researcher thinking about “How to imagine the world without Europe?”. That was the question curators Yuderkys Espinosa and Katia Sepúlveda posed to a group of racialized and mixed-race artists from Abya Yala committed to decolonization processes. The idea was to exchange ideas on our future(s). How would the future look like if Europe had not intervened? Which other societal models would this future imply, and which memories can we relate to that show us different possible futures?
The curators state: “Through different formats, this exhibition seeks to appeal to the sensibilities and world orders that challenge and resist the future model proposed by the Western World. This exercise in speculative fiction and critical fabulation falls back on the anti-futurism as an undominated concept of time, and asks us to retrace our steps in an exercise of memory and reinvention of space and time. If the today we live in is the future that modernity dreamed of, the people who have suffered its onslaught and its ideology remind us that “the future is gone”; the future is behind us and not ahead.
The exhibition portrays marronage as a flight and escape from the materialistic plantation-world of the hierarchical European civilisational matrix of labour, populations and bodies organised under the aegis of racial capitalism and its thirst to accumulate.”
https://ajuntament.barcelona.cat/lavirreina/en/research/future-gone-cimarron-anti-futurism/550
https://artssantamonica.gencat.cat/en/detall/Anti-Futurisme-Cimarron
